V FOR VERACITY

By the way, regardingV...liked the pilot, on the fence about the rest. Three showrunners before one episode airs...I dunno...

The trouble is, aside from providing an excuse for awesome "reveal" shots where the giant ship blots out the sun, it's actually a completely nonsensical way for extraterrestrials to make an entrance.

Shut the fuck up. This is that guy. You know that guy. The one who picks apart everything. He's the fat fuck at the comic store who says he knows who will win in a fight between the Thing and the Hulk and pulls out a cruddy little mold-encrusted notebook where he's worked out the reasons, not based on comics continuity, but on physics. Because he apparently has full understanding involved with the physics of a man made of fucking orange rock....that can bend at the joints.

This is directed at you, you scraggily haired freak that didn't have a problem with the feasibility of video and sound amplification in addressing entire cities from the underside of a flying saucer.

FOUR THREE REASONS V'S MOTHERSHIPS DON'T MAKE PERFECT SENSE.

1. We'd totally see them coming

In V, 29 massive ships suddenly appear in our airspace with nothing but a few minutes of ominous rumbling noises to tip everybody off. What, was everyone at NASA asleep for the last six months? Their Near Earth Object Program has a whole mess of telescopes dedicated to tracking space objects that might be headed for earth.

I don't recall the show specifying that they didn't use something like a hyperspace or FTL jump system or that they didn't move at the speed of light. Because, at C, there's no reason to expect that the information would disseminate from NASA in the few minutes before they hit the atmosphere. Have the facts, yo.

Ah, anti-gravity: the sci-fi scriptwriter's best friend. As characters in V handily point out, the Visitors use some sort of magical control over gravitation to keep their monstrous ships aloft. Fine. But in the real world, that kind of feat requires thrust, and thrust requires energy — lots of it. I did some back-of-the-envelope estimates using Wolfram Alpha and some standard high-school physics equations, and discovered that it would take about 368 quadrillion joules of energy to propel a 3km-wide, 500m-tall steel ellipsoid 1000 meters into the air. (And that doesn't include keeping it up there.)

See, you got it right in the first sentence and then went and got it wrong. It's the assumption that all we know now is all we'll ever know. Thrust is what we know and thrust is what it must be. I'm perfectly willing to accept that if an alien species has the ability to travel massive distances it takes to get here from wherever, translate all our languages perfectly, and be able to grow human flesh over their lizard scales in perfect undetectable disguises, then it's not a stretch to figure that they're advanced enough they perhaps they have found a means to manipulate or negate gravity by directly acting on that force of nature, not by trying to counter it through sheer force. And if they can do that, they can probably generate massive energy with little effort...if gravity negation even needs that much energy. And don't think you can estimate that, you're a cro-magnon trying to figure out a DVD player.

4. If we bring one down, it's game over for the planet (or, at least that continent)

This is more our problem than theirs, but still: An uncontrolled impact from an object that big would be like "hundreds of nukes," says Alexander Pavlov of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. And that's just if it hits from a few miles up, where jets fly.

Again, you had it and you lost it. No, "but still." In fact, it's practically a defense feature. The humans below don't have the option of bringing a mothership down because of the disaterous impact. Defense by design. That would...wait for it...MAKE FUCKING SENSE.